Bookmark: The imagined hells of Philip Roth

The iconic American author explains why he creates fictional disasters.

Roth 311.
(photo credit:Bloomberg News)

Perhaps one of the keys to aging as a writer, Philip Roth is saying, is how one
engages with calamity. Certainly, that’s an issue in his latest novel, which
involves a polio epidemic in the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New
Jersey, in the summer of 1944.

“I was making a list of subjects I had
lived through that I’ve never written about,” the author explains, sitting in a
small conference room at the Manhattan offices of his publisher, long fingers
steepled before him, voice smooth and understated as if worn down a little bit
by time. “There were quite a few, and when I thought polio, I began to wonder
how to treat it. I was born in 1933, so I lived through the polio scare for many
years.”

At 77, Roth has spent much of his career considering various
menaces, of both the individual and the collective sort. His 2004 novel The Plot
Against America posits an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh wins the
1940 presidential election, ushering in an oddly nativist form of fascism; the
American trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain)
identifies a more elusive danger: the strident sanctimony that, since at least
the Red scare of the 1950s, has been a dominant thread in the fabric of our
public life.

Nemesis has more than a little in common with such efforts,
both because of its Newark setting – Newark is to Roth what Dublin is to Joyce,
a landscape to which his imagination has consistently returned since the
publication of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959 – and also because of
the atmosphere of barely controlled panic, of “vile accusation and intemperate
hatred,” that runs throughout the book. The story of Bucky Cantor, a 23-
year-old playground director who is forced to choose between the kids under his
care and his devotion to the young woman he wants to marry, becomes a nearly
biblical inquiry into conscience and responsibility, as well as the ongoing and
irresolvable conflict between humanity and God.

“Doesn’t God have a
conscience?” Bucky wonders as he struggles to deal with the sweep of the disease
across his community. “Where’s His responsibility?” In Roth’s view, of course,
this has everything to do with writing. “I have no argument with God,” he says,
“because I don’t believe in God.”

Nonetheless, it’s hard to read Nemesis
without a sense of if not theology then theodicy, the question of, as Roth puts
it, “how God’s goodness can exist in the face of all these
catastrophes.”

To Bucky, this becomes the substance of a moral crisis; to
Roth, it is yet another iteration of the themes that mark his late novels, going
back to 2006’s Everyman. These are dark books, concerned with tragic, even last
things: the death of the protagonist in Everyman; the series of “small,
ridiculous” mistakes that prove disastrous for the narrator of Indignation
(2008); the loss of acuity that afflicts the aging actor at the center of The
Humbling (2009). Taken together, they form a suite of sorts – “Nemeses: Short
Novels,” as Roth has taken to calling them, “a sequence of thinking on my part
about cataclysm.”

Yet here again, Roth raises a compelling set of
distinctions, between the writer and the character, between the author and his
work. For all his interest in collapse or ruination, he is refreshingly
lighthearted about it; at one point, he jokes, “I’m on a cataclysm
kick.”

And for all that we may read the books as autobiographical – an
older writer putting his own concerns or worries into his fiction – Roth is
adamant that what he’s about is, as it has always been, the art of storytelling,
that to read him otherwise is to misunderstand the way literature
works.

That’s a complicated argument, considering that so many of Roth’s
books have appropriated the substance of his life as a starting point. It’s not
just Newark, where he was born and raised, but also his struggle with Jewish
middle-class conformity, as well as his fascination with a certain unfettered
sexuality, as embodied in novels such as Sabbath’s Theater and Portnoy’s
Complaint. The latter book, in particular – a rabid confession from the
psychotherapist’s couch that made Roth a superstar when it appeared in 1969 –
has long been regarded as a thinly veiled personal statement, an illusion Roth
encouraged when he created Zuckerman, a writer who becomes infamous for a novel,
Carnovsky, which has something of the same effect.

And yet, if Roth is
willing to acknowledge the connection, he is insistent that such readings “fail
to understand the nature of imagination, which is what the writer has. People
think that when a character is angry, the writer is angry. But it’s not as
simple as that. The writer is delighted to have found the character’s anger. Or
his obstinacy. Or his unpredictability. It isn’t that I’m unpredictable and
obstinate. I’m just delighted that he is.”

Perhaps the most useful way to
think about it, Roth continues, is as a performance, in which he requires
certain details, certain props, with which to work. One element feeds another,
until the story reveals itself.

“I don’t know very much,” he says about
how he begins a novel. “I write my way into my knowledge. Then, if I’m lucky, I
get a break. That’s why it’s so important to get started. Because however awful
starting is – and it is absolutely awful – when you get into it, when you’ve got
10 pages, which may take two weeks, then you can begin to build.”

In the
case of Nemesis, it was Bucky’s girlfriend who provided the breakthrough, with
her desire to keep him safe.

At other times, one novel has functioned as
the fulcrum for another, shifting his entire body of work. This is what happened
with The Ghost Writer (1979) and The Counterlife (1986), both of which represent
significant turning points. “The Counterlife especially,” Roth recalls,
“jettisoned me into Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater, and then I was
cooking on all burners and stuff was just coming out of me.”

By his own
admission, Roth isn’t writing like that anymore; as he says, “I don’t have that
kind of energy now.” Yet with Nemesis, as with Everyman and Indignation before
it, he is talking through himself to himself, across the arc of his career.
Among the most striking aspects of the novel is how much it reflects books such
as Goodbye, Columbus and The Plot Against America, in not just narrative but
theme too. Like the former, it involves a working-class boy in love with both an
upper-middle-class girl and the seeming safety of her family. Like the latter,
it evokes a fictional disaster – there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944,
any more than there was a Lindbergh presidency – as a cautionary measurement, an
expression of how fortunate we were.

“I don’t know what causes me to want
to imagine some hell that didn’t happen,” Roth says, his voice quietly
expressive, “but I think in a way it’s a tribute to our luck.”

– Los
Angeles Times/MCT

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